Yummy Yummy in My Tummy

Patrick Stuart has written an interesting post about tweaking the rules of D&D -- or rather tweaking how you use the rules of D&D -- to encourage a different play style, one that is gentler and more social. One of the things he talks about is food, how the sharing of food is an important social ritual, and how that could be reflected in a game.

(Be warned, I am now about to miss about 98% of the point of Patrick's post.)

That got me thinking about how food is used in role-playing games, or rather how it isn't. Meals and rations appear on equipment lists and you may have one of those GMs that pays attention to whether the player-characters are eating enough, but for the most part it's either a background element or a nuisance, a "starvation counter" that needs to be managed along with how many arrows or torches you have.

It seems a bit of a waste and it would be nice if more were made of food in games, as Patrick suggests.

(It's interesting that what fantasy games have taken from Lord of the Rings is the long walks but not the many, many pages of discussion of what the characters are eating and how it tastes. That's a bit weird.)

I've always been fond of how food is used in Fighting Fantasy, perhaps because I grew up reading-playing the books. There food is presented as a source of healing; if you are stabbed by a GOBLIN then you get better by eating sandwiches. It's an abstraction to the point of nonsense but the silliness is part of the charm. I love the idea of a battered group of adventurers having a picnic and emerging healed of their wounds.

Food-as-healing seems common in computer games, I suppose again because it's a useful abstraction that sort of makes sense, and the immediacy of the idea works well in context. Another seminal influence on my philosophy of games -- ludo-philosophy? -- is Sega's Phantasy Star, which has a science-fantasy setting somewhere between Greek myth and Star Wars, and in which the main healing items are burgers and cola. Again, the absurdity of the idea of adventurers going around a dungeon with a bag full of Big Macs and bottles of Pepsi appeals to me.

A recent and more complex implementation of the idea is Final Fantasy XV, which makes food the most important part of the resting mechanic, and gestures in the vague direction of the social elements Patrick is talking about. Ignis, the party butler -- they never say it, but he's obviously the butler -- cooks a meal for the adventurers every time they rest. Most of his dishes give some sort of bonus to character statistics and if the recipe is a favourite of one of the other party members, there's an added effect for that character. Travelling the world and speaking to people exposes Ignis to new ingredients and tastes that he can add to his notebook, which is a nice way to integrate the characters into the setting and reward exploration.




Almost all of the bonuses are combat related, because that's the sort of game FFXV is, so it doesn't get into the sort of thing Patrick discusses, but the fact that different characters have different favourites is a nice touch -- and one easy to pull into your average D&D game; a d100 table of favourite meals is easy enough to do -- and we are at least treated to a little cut scene each time, with the lads sitting around a camp fire in those flimsy folding fishing chairs, enjoying the meal and each other's company. It's a start, anyway.

Where am I going with all this? I don't know. Perhaps nowhere. I think all I wanted to say is that because of how I started in gaming I have this feeling that food should be more prominent in our games, even if it's just replacing healing potions with meatball subs and packs of Monster Munch, but it would be nice to do something more.

Boy Band Road Trip XV

I know I was excited about Final Fantasy Versus XIII but it's been so long since the game was announced that I don't remember why. Even so, now it's out -- and now called Final Fantasy XV -- and I have it.

I haven't got very far into the game; I'm only on the third of thirteen chapters, and it could all go to heck after this point, but I've also put in about forty hours, which tells you both a lot about my play style and about how much I'm enjoying it.

When I finish the game I may come back with some more thoughts, but here's what I think so far, in a format stolen from my old mate Andy.

The Good

The protagonists look like a rubbish boy band and they do come across as chumps but they also turn out early on to be quite endearing. It's a computer game so the acting isn't brilliant but there is a real sense of camaraderie in the party and because they convince me that they care about each other, I end up caring about them too. My favourite is Ignis, who cooks, drives, and is English, so I think is supposed to be the main character Noctis' butler. He has a wonderful habit of shouting about recipes, even when the party is supposed to be sneaking through the woods, trying to avoid mind flayers. As he's English he will probably turn out to be a traitor, but for now he's ace.

I like the setting more than I expected too. It's a sort of modern fantasy so everyone's dressed in normal clothes and they drive cars and they go to diners, but they are also carrying magic spears and the man flipping the burgers at the diner is also handing out monster-hunting quests and rumours about treasure. I think there's been a bit of grumbling about FFXV not being a traditional mediaeval fantasy setting, but it's not as if the series hasn't done similar things before; everyone loves FFVII and that starts with a train pulling into a station in an industrial city. It helps that the design is consistent; I like a patchwork fantasy world -- Titan is a mess of influences that shouldn't work, and I love it nonetheless -- but FFXV's world does have a certain verisimilitude.

The game blocks exploration at first but once a certain story point is reached early on you are free to roam. There's a bit of backlash against open world games these days and I can understand why, but I love to explore at my own pace and FFXV doesn't stop me from poking around in the corners of the map. I'm also happy with the region-based level scaling; in general, monsters get tougher the further away you get from the starting area and I much prefer that approach to something like Skyrim, in which the bandits that were level 4 last time you passed their cave are now level 16. In tabletop gaming terms, FFXV feels more like an old-school wilderness crawl than I would have expected from something so shiny and new; you can even run into creatures far outside of the usual level range for that area, the equivalent of the GM rolling the most unlikely result on her wandering monster table.

Oh, and the monsters fight each other! They need to be goaded into it but then you can sit back and watch them pummel each other, and you even get to keep the loot they drop. It's a little detail but it makes the world feel less artificial, and there's something fun about setting off a little bit of chaos in a system and watching it escalate.



The Bad

Menu-based combat seems to be out of fashion in rpgs these days, as there is a common perception that it requires no skill -- which anyone who's played Disgaea will tell you is ballcocks -- so in FFXV you have direct control over Noctis, and the idea is that you run about looking for openings, and dodge in and out of the fight. This works in something like Dark Souls because there's a sense of weight to the fighting and it makes a difference if you get hit. That's not the case in FFXV, in which combat feels light and soft, and there's no major benefit to being dynamic when you can just hold down the circle button until the enemies are dead. I fail to see how that requires more skill.

The Ugly

The protagonists are not, it turns out, members of a rubbish boy band, but they do look like a rubbish boy band, and while you can change their outfits, the small number of alternatives also look like what a rubbish boy band would wear. This game is crying out out for big bags of costumes like Final Fantasy X-2 had; I'm not a big fan of publishers selling frivolous extra content like outfits, but even I would consider paying 50p for something that's not some black trousers and a black jacket.

As you can see, there's far more Good, which is, er, good, because I was a bit wary going into the game. I haven't played all of the titles in the Final Fantasy series -- I haven't started IX yet and that's considered to be the best one -- but I am a bit of a fan. It's far too early to tell if XV will unseat my favourite, 2006's XII, but already it has a better story -- although that wouldn't be difficult -- and the gameplay is almost as much fun, aside from the terrible combat mechanics. We'll see how things progress as I put in more hours over the Chrimble break, but it's thumbs up so far.